John berger ways of seeing london bbc 1972 chapter 7
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We are transported inside someone else’s mind where we rediscover the known and the familiar through the unknown and the unfamiliar. The resulting adaptation situates us, the spectators, in the privileged position of seeing the familiar (our own personal reading and interpretation) from an alternative perspective. Therefore, the filmmaker, embarking upon a work of adaptation, is not involved in a straightforward process of translating, decoding, and “accurately” reformulating, but in the on-going, creative act of reading, that is to say, imagining, visualising, and inventing. It is thus up to the viewer to have as open and receptive a response as does the reader. It is far too simplistic to see film images as fragments of reality they too must be read, interpreted, and imagined. Secondly, and perhaps more controversially, it follows that the film resulting from this dynamic dialogue must be allowed to offer the same challenges and ambiguities that inspired it. Recognition of this fact automatically leads to two others: first, the process of adaptation is, essentially, a reading of the source text the shooting script or film which results is born of the process of creative imagining which occurs through a dynamic dialogue between novel and filmmaker. The very act of reading involves inventing, imagining, visualising, in a dialogue between reader and novel, much of which takes place in the spaces between the words or between the lines in the silences and interstices in the text which the reader fills in with her or his personal experiences and fields of reference. If the particular strength of literature is the freedom of interpretation it accords its readers, then they cannot be criticised for getting it “wrong”. It is particularly ironic, therefore, that the same critical voices that argue that film is inferior because it cannot offer the spectator the creative freedom that a book offers the reader, all too frequently berate a given film for its lack of fidelity to the original: the settings, characters, ambience are “wrong” (for example, too fat, too thin, too beautiful, not beautiful enough, and so forth) (see, for instance, McFarlane 2000, 1996 Taubin 2001). I have used the somewhat problematic term “language” in relation to cinema at this point because it serves to highlight the traditional – but sadly, still common – notion that a filmic adaptation of a novel (especially a “classic”), constitutes an attempt to replicate an inherently superior linguistic form, using an inevitably inferior, image-based medium that, in other words, the iconic, mimetic images of cinema can never adequately replicate the linguistic complexities and ambiguities of literature. Lettre d'information n☁42 - novembre 2021īoth Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, and Terence Davies’s adaptation (2000), are complex, multi-layered, subtle, and challenging works, and in this paper, I hope to explore with you the relationship between the two, briefly referencing the context of adaptation, and then identifying a number of ways in which, far from constituting a pale reflection or limitation of the source text, an adaptation might actually open up new perspectives on, and new insights into both the original text and – possibly ̶ the language of cinema itself. Lettre d'information n☁40 - septembre 2021 Lettre d'information n☁33 - décembre 2020 Lettre d'information n☁32 - novembre 2020 Lettre d'information n☁30 - septembre 2020
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